Dorothy Malone

If she weren't acting, actress Dorothy Malone would have loved to open a Mexican restaurant in California. The Chicago-born, Texas-raised actress, who won an Oscar for her memorable performance as Marylee, the bad-rich Southern girl in "Written On the Wind," loves to cook. "I can make any recipe you hand me," she said. "I paint that way sometimes. I do a little bit of everything, something I learned from my mother."
Versatile Ms. Malone, whose talents extend to interior decorating ("for me, fixing up a house is like taking a vacation''), repeated in 1985 her role as Constance in the NBC movie, "Peyton Place: The Next Generation"
Daughter of well-to-do Dallas parents, Malone was educated at an Ursuline convent and Miss Hockaday's School before she enrolled in Southern Methodist University and became seriously interested in dramatics. She was a leggy, lovely student when she appeared in a play called "Starbound," about a young girl who went to Hollywood and moved into the fabled Studio Club.
Shortly afterward, she was a young girl in Hollywood living in the Studio Club and doing very well as an actress, too.
Along with playing a series of bad girls in pictures like "The Bit- Sleep," "Tarnished Angels" and ''Too Much Too Soon." she played a really rotten , man-hungry Texas oil heiress in "Written on the Wind" and, for her portrayal, won an Oscar.
That was in 1956, and shortly afterward her private life became as dramatic as her life on screen. In 1959, she was married to French actor Jacques Bergerac, previously married to Ginger Rogers, and by him had two daughters, Mimi and Diane. Approximately four years later, she filed for divorce, triggering a series of courtroom confrontations the "Peyton Place" writers probably wished they'd thought of. At one point, at Bergerac's insistence, she was ordered by the court to supply her daughter, Mimi, with French lessons. Jail was her alternative.
The incensed father complained that his daughter was learning Spanish rather than his native
tongue, and he wanted no more of it.
Throughout her tribulations, Dorothy kept her Dallas sense of decorum, but finally life in Hollywood became so hectic that she fled back to Texas.
In 1968, she told the press that for the sake of her health and in order to reduce her cost of living she was moving back home. Her second marriage which took place in Las Vegas neither lasted as long as her first nor produced its repercussions.
Now Dorothy's living near Dallas, happy to be close to her parents but somewhat homesick
for Hollywood. "All of us, the girls and I, miss California," she says, "and we go out every chance we get. But we also enjoy the atmosphere here."